


Heals All Wounds

by Roselightfairy



Series: Finding a Voice: OCs and Extras [9]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Blood and Injury, Diverse Tolkien Week 2021, Elf Culture & Customs, Family, Gen, Homesickness, Language Barrier, References to Depression, Valinor, Wood-elves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 20:20:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29906532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roselightfairy/pseuds/Roselightfairy
Summary: And yet that urgency is familiar enough, even if the words skim past her ears – she remembers seeing it in the elves that gathered to greet her, remembers the arms reaching to help her, the healers descending upon her. It is the greeting committee for one who has traveled here not by choice but by necessity. This is no joyous arrival, no voyage made for love and longing for a reunion, but something desperate.Did she not know this was the only way her family would come to her?Valinor may be a land of peace and healing, but that does not mean its residents are free of homesickness – particularly those who never wished to sail to begin with. After a thousand years of living without her family, Cuindis struggles with what it means to welcome a daughter-in-lawto join her at last.
Relationships: Original Female Character & Original Female Character
Series: Finding a Voice: OCs and Extras [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2054061
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	Heals All Wounds

**Author's Note:**

> This is yet another one of those OC gapfillers within the sprawling set of headcanons that makes up my Finding a Voice ‘verse. The main characters, if you haven’t read anything from this, are Cuindis (Legolas’s mother) and Siril (his sister-in-law, aka his sister’s wife). The premise is that both characters were wounded (Cuindis spiritually and Siril physically) as a result of the ongoing danger in Mirkwood and were forced to leave their home to find healing in Valinor – but that neither ever would have left Middle-earth of their own free will. 
> 
> This story was one I attempted to write during Diverse Tolkien Week (which was a couple of weeks ago now), so I’m very sorry for the lateness of this fill! I initially intended it for the Day 1 prompt, Women of Color, but then as I realized it was set in Valinor, it started skewing more Day 4 (Religion/Faith/Culture), and there might be a little bit of Day 2 (Disability) in it as well because of the state of both characters upon their arrival – but I don’t want to claim that I’m doing any kind of disability representation here since the characters explicitly went to Valinor to be healed from illness or injury. I’m not entirely sure where the line is and I don’t want to cross it. Also, there is a dash of Day 3 (LGBTQ+) in there because although the relationship doesn’t appear in the story, Siril is a lady elf married to another lady elf, and that marriage is what forms the relationship between these characters. So I guess this story is just a bit of many things but not enough of any one thing to be a complete fill.
> 
> I tend to write the elves of Mirkwood as people of color, given the colonial coding of their situation. But I also try to walk a careful line where although Tolkien presumably intended Thranduil (and Oropher) to be more of a traditional colonization situation, I imagine the Silvan culture as the dominant tradition within the realm and Thranduil/Oropher’s leadership established as something of a mutually beneficial arrangement based on the external political climate in Middle-earth at the time of their migration. All that being said, I am a “well-intentioned” white person striving to do better, so please let me know if there’s anything in this piece that is harmful or insensitive.
> 
> Oh, also there’s some language stuff that I just made up. Sorry if it’s wrong, but – all for the narrative, darling.
> 
> Thanks so much to [The_Dwelf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Dwelf/pseuds/The_Dwelf) for giving this a read-through and sharing thoughts on disability - but all mistakes or flaws are my own.

Time passes strangely in Valinor.

Cuindis is still – still, after the thousand years she has been here – accustomed to marking time by the season, by the changes in the patterns of the sun, the trees, the animals in the forest, the color of the leaves braided into her hair and wreathing her husband’s brow. (That last she cannot think on for too long, lest the loneliness rise up in her throat and keep her from breathing.) Here, though the seasons still change, it feels – slower, somehow. Or maybe faster – time swallowed up in great gulps, disorienting in its sameness, so that she does not know how much time has passed from any significant day to the next.

Or maybe it is that at home, she truly marked the time in companionship – in celebration when it was possible and in closeness when it was not – and here, she is alone. Alone, separated from her family and her customs and her beloved home.

She is not the only Greenwood elf here – but those who chose to leave the Halls of Mandos for the shores of Valinor are few indeed. Oropher is one of them – drawn here, he explains, after some thousand years by the call of his family and his wife, those memories of an older time in his life that Cuindis has never known. She passes time with him sometimes, with him and with his wife, the mother-in-law she never met on the shores of her birth, and sometimes she catches flickers in him of the same isolation she feels: an outsider, a ruler without a crown, without a people, bereft of the Silvan traditions they carried for so long. But he does not confide in her; without the buffer of Thranduil between them, Cuindis has never been privy to Oropher’s thoughts.

Dravaor too has family here, though ze confesses that ze often feels alone as well – ze lived longer in the Greenwood than ze ever did in Doriath, and the clusters that have formed, the imitations and alterations to kingdoms that existed on Middle-earth an age ago, do not quite feel like a home for those who have come from those eastern shores.

Cuindis finds the same among the small cluster of wood-elves who came from Mandos after the war two thousand years ago – the way they live is familiar to her yet not, welcoming yet distant. She recognizes them, but was never close to them; she finds welcome among them, but not belonging – and though this land has warmed the chill that gripped her heart, though it has saved her life and her soul, that only means she is now free to miss home so much that it aches.

And then one day, something changes.

She can feel it in the air, a change in scent or a whisper on the wind, a call – a call to _her_. She has seen other elves do this before – abandon everything to run to the shore for nothing more than a voice on the wind, a promise of an arrival – but she has never understood it until now, the lurch-leap in her heart – dread of what might have happened to send one of her loved ones here, the undeniable hope for companionship –

She cannot know what it means until she has seen for herself, and like so many before her, she drops everything and runs.

The ship is docking when she reaches the harbor – and the dock itself is bustling with activity: elves rushing towards the ship, speaking urgently to its passengers, shouting to one another in languages Cuindis has yet to truly learn. She has found cause to be grateful for the Sindarin tongue – divergent as its variants are on Middle-earth, they are yet similar enough that she can make herself understood to others who have traveled here – but the Qenya that is the native language on these shores is strange to her even after a thousand years. She has come to understand it when spoken slowly, but the urgency in these voices now blurs the sounds into a senseless cacophony to her ears.

And yet that urgency is familiar enough, even if the words skim past her ears – she remembers seeing it in the elves that gathered to greet her, remembers the arms reaching to help her, the healers descending upon her. It is the greeting committee for one who has traveled here not by choice but by necessity. This is no joyous arrival, no voyage made for love and longing for a reunion, but something desperate.

Did she not know this was the only way her family would come to her?

She makes her way through the crowd, weaving when she can – her agility has not left her, for all the trees here are wider-spaced and less threatening than her home became – and pushing when she cannot, shrugging away the dark looks and rebukes in a language she does not understand. She will not be in anyone’s way, but she _knows_ without needing to ask that someone she loves is on that ship – and that all is not well.

Cuindis has witnessed arrivals before, and while the ships that arrive typically bear a gangplank, the elves aboard rarely use it. More often they are so glad to be arrived at last, so thrilled to greet those who await them, that they simply clamber over the edge of the ship, leap to the dock, dash ashore. Now the plank is being lowered for a smooth disembarking; the elves on the ship speak Sindarin with a distinctive cadence and wear the garb of Imladris.

In an instant, Cuindis feels she has been transported out of her body, out of the slow-fast glide of time and into her own arrival a thousand – is it so long? – years ago. She too came with a company of elves from Imladris, she and Dravaor – those who were already prepared to sail and could guide their passage and ensure her own wellness. For a moment the physicality of the memory overtakes her – the deep weariness in her bones, the ice crusting over her soul, so that her legs wavered as surely as her heart – and she sees as though from outside herself the plank lowering, Dravaor escorting her across with an arm around her waist, supporting her faltering feet –

This elf – whoever has arrived here in need of healing – is not being escorted across the plank, but carried. And as soon as those who bear her have stepped clear of the ship, Cuindis can see who it is, and her breath catches.

Siril.

She cannot think further than that – she is rushing in pursuit of the healers carrying her away, heedless of the looks sent her way. Siril – here – why? How? Siril is no warrior; how could she have come by injury grave enough that she would be sent here and carried ashore? Or have things grown so dire at her home that even those who never meant to be soldiers have taken up the mantle?

There is an infirmary near to the harbor, a small stone hut, meant to take in those who arrive ailing in body or spirit, to stabilize them long enough to allow the magic in the air here to work on them. Cuindis trails in the wake of the procession carrying Siril, follows her to a room, listens to the near-incomprehensible babble of languages and dialects she does not speak, of healing-specific terms she would not know even if she did. Crowds her way into the room and hovers in the corner, watching, waiting.

Siril is not still, she notices now – she shudders and thrashes, sweat gleaming on her forehead, hair spilling limply over the edge of her bed. The healers peel bandages carefully away from her abdomen – and all let out a gasp of dismay.

Cuindis is on her feet without the intent to rise, joining them at Siril’s bedside to take in the gaping wounds, slow-oozing poison – gaping _still_ , even after the days of her voyage – how has she been living with such a grievous hurt? And how – she has never known anyone to die in Valinor; does not know what would happen even if someone did, but – but she has only just arrived; how can it be possible that she might leave? And she was sent here to heal, she must have been, but how –

She is vaguely aware of crying out, surging forward – time and space blur around her as she forgets sense in a moment of desperate panic, and they do not settle again until she is out in the hall, by order and not by choice, sitting opposite an elf assigned to keep watch on her, to keep her out of the way of the healers doing their work. She pays her guardian no mind, her eyes fixed on the door, her ears straining to hear any noise behind it, though she now suspects they are deliberately using a tongue she does not understand –

And then, an unmistakable sound: a cry of pain.

Cuindis’s whole body jolts with the sound – the first sound of Siril’s voice in hundreds of years and this is how it sounds? This is how Cuindis must hear her after long separation, after trial, after yearning –

A warning word from her guardian is the only thing that keeps her from lurching to her feet again and wrenching the door open, heedless of her orders. A warning word – and the knowledge that she can do nothing for this. Is this how they all felt years ago, when she was the one lying helpless in the bed, holding her son to her breast – ah, her _son_ , who must be grown now! Legolas – what must he look like, what must he _be_ like? Siril knows him; Siril must have watched him grow, and she can tell Cuindis – she can tell her everything, when she is healed –

She must.

“Who is she?” asks the healer opposite her, and Cuindis flinches at the sudden words – directed at her, for once. Perhaps merely an effort to distract her, but the healer’s eyes are kind. “To you, I mean?”

Cuindis’s fingers knot in her lap. “My daughter.”

She fumbles a bit over the second word. The Sindarin she learned from her husband, a different branch from the language she speaks among her own people, has a word for it – a way of distinguishing the difference between a child and a child’s spouse – but her Silvan tongue does not. They spoke both, at home, but she never bothered to distinguish with Siril, her daughter in all but blood. And even now, though she does not speak her own language, she finds herself using the plain word: daughter, not _daughter-in-law_.

The healer does not question her. No one here would even think to, would they? Siril looks more like Cuindis than does her own daughter – in coloring, at least, though their features are little alike – both with the brown skin and brown-black hair of the Silvan elves, unmingled with Sindarin blood. And yet it is they who are here now, they who were taken in different ways by the creeping gloom in their forest, while Thranduil remains on those shores his people refused to forsake, giving all of himself in defense of his chosen home. And Laerwen –

And Laerwen. And Legolas.

Cuindis closes her eyes and allows herself to feel it, crashing fully down on her unnumbed by the distant and unreal passage of time: that deepest ache that even the magic of this land cannot soothe away. Siril, her daughter, come to join her at last – what news has she of Laerwen, the daughter of her blood? What of Legolas, the son she had no chance to know?

And what of Siril herself? Who has she become in these years of their separation, where time passes with an immediacy that Cuindis has nearly forgotten? Will Cuindis ever have a chance to find out?

“She will be well,” the healer says at last, a gentle voice breaking the silence that has fallen between them – a kinder sound than the moans from behind the door. “Within days, doubtless. She will.”

“Then I will wait here until she is,” says Cuindis.

* * *

She waits for three days.

The healers let her into Siril’s room eventually, after that first day when they have at last purged the poison from her blood and stitched her bleeding wounds. She sleeps, deep and true, and Cuindis clasps her hand and watches the motion of her eyes behind closed lids and wonders what she is dreaming.

Three days, and her breathing slows and smooths from ragged to even; her skin warms from ashen to glowing brown. The line between her brows eases away, her lips relax. The wounds knit until the healers remove the bandages at last and only faint scars remain. She is too thin, skin folding around empty spaces that were once full with flesh and muscle, but – but that too can be mended. That too can heal.

Three days, and on the third, finally, her eyelids flutter open. The pressure of her hand increases, as though she feels it clasped for the first time, and Cuindis seeks her eyes not daring to hope, and finds them open and clear and fixed on her own.

“Nana?” Siril rasps, and for a moment Cuindis’s vision goes blurry with tears. How long has it been since she has been thus named? How long since Siril has named anyone thusly, estranged as she is from her own mother?

“Yes, my daughter,” she whispers, her voice too choked for clearer sound. “I am here.”

“You are here,” murmurs Siril. “And I am here with you.” She closes her eyes for another long moment, then opened them. “It was not a nightmare, then. Or is this the dream?”

A dream, or a nightmare? Cuindis remembers well her own arrival here – the relief, at first, of the release from the pain . . . and then the slower-dawning realization of a longer-lasting, deeper ache – bearable, yes, but not curable. “This is no dream,” is all she says.

“No?” Siril’s fingers wander down to her abdomen, push aside the light gown she wears – and she gasps at the smooth skin there. “They are – they are gone,” she murmurs.

“Nearly,” says Cuindis. She bites her tongue against the urge to ask about the circumstances of the wound to begin with; Siril will tell her eventually, surely. Surely she will tell –

“I thought they would never go,” Siril murmurs. “They said – years, perhaps, or the rest of my life – unless.” Her eyes sharpen; her arm tenses and her fingers clench in the skin of her own belly. “Unless – and you are here – and so. This is Valinor, then?”

“It is,” says Cuindis. “Although I suppose that too sounds like a dream.” Their family is closer to Valinor than others in their wood, if only through tales – but it was only Thranduil’s assurance, Elrond’s promises, that allowed Cuindis even to believe there would be a land on the other side of the sea. How desperate with pain Siril must have been to agree to the risk . . .

“Valinor.” Siril’s voice is still breathy, barely there – puffs of air in the shape of words. “Without hesitation did I consent to leave my home and come here, driven by pain. Now . . .” Her fingers wander over her belly again, stroking the healed skin. “Now I wonder how much of it was real.”

“It was real.” Cuindis knows nothing of the circumstances of Siril’s wounds – nothing beyond what she can guess, anyway – knows nothing of the wood before her departure – and yet she knows this: that doubt, that question: _was it worth this_. “Nothing but that would have driven you from your home.”

“And you,” Siril says. “It must have been, for I – this” – She glances around herself, her hair shifting on the pillow – taking in, no doubt, the quiet, bright stone room; the sound of waves breaking on the shore outside. “This is not right. This is not home.”

“No,” Cuindis says softly. It is not home, and it has not been her home for a thousand years – and she will not deceive Siril by pretending it ever will be. “It is not.”

“But you are here,” says Siril. “And I am here, and Laerwen – she will come, someday. She will come.” She presses Cuindis’s hand. “She promised.”

 _Promised_. Cuindis’s eyes sting at that word, at that faintest thread of hope that one day her daughter will come to her – that one day, she may even come to know her son. Time may pass strangely here, but all that means is that perhaps it will not feel so long after all.

“Someday,” she echoes. Someday – she dares not wish for them that it will be soon, but time changes all things, and she can hope at least that one day their reunion will be a cause for joy. Laerwen would never break a promise she made to Siril, after all. Someday she will see her daughter again – and now, in this moment, one daughter is already here by her side. It is not home, no – but this is the first true piece of her home she has felt in hundreds of years, and there is some peace in that, even if it will never be enough.

“It is not our home,” she repeats. “And it never will be.” But for the first time, with her family beside her, the next words do not feel like a comforting falsehood. “But perhaps eventually we can make it a new one.”


End file.
